The trial of Jose Padilla is starting.

I remember pretty well the moment I heard about Padilla in 2002 and said, "Held without charges indefinitely? What the fuck?" If anything currently going on in a courtroom makes a difference to the kind of country we'll be living in, this does.

When I've had health insurance I always ended up picking doctors at random in my neighborhood. Back in Brooklyn I was living in Little Warsaw where, oddly enough, every third building is either a hair salon, a liquor store, a Catholic church, or a doctor's office. My doctor was a 60-something-year-old Polish lady. I walked in with a swollen tonsil or something, and fatigue and general feeling crappiness... this was in my first year working night shift at a hospital. She listened briefly and then handed down the word with proper Old World doctorly authority:

"Listen to me. You are tired. You look depress.
Is not a good job for young man.
Find a nice woman who cooks for you.
Have you met my secretary?"

Against medical advice I remained single, kept working as a nurse and moved to San Francisco. I got another random doctor - this time a 40-something Middle Eastern woman with a slightly more cheerful but equally authoritative tone. I went in today for some more not very interesting complaints.

"You look tired. Are you unhappy?"

Well, I'm kind of tired... actually I'm mostly pretty happy, just not so happy with my job sometimes, and some stressful things and...

"Listen to me. Do you like classes?"

Uh... well, I'm thinking about going back to school next year, if I can work part-time...

"No: do you like classes?"

...Like what?

"Do you know Landmark Forum? It's a very good, very special thing. Can make a big difference. A little expensive, but if you can, you should try..." etc., etc.

Aieee! If you don't know, Landmark is the descendant of Est. Truly I'm in California now. (Also, the last three people who mentioned it to me were all Sutter Health employees. What the hell?)

I have to admit I'm following the Department of Justice shenanigans a little obsessively. There's a little bit of everything there. Some basic Schadenfreude at seeing a few Bush cronies sweat a little. The folksy comedy of the Attorney General finding various ways to say "I have no idea what the hell I've been doing or whether it was right." The creepy gangster scene of Bush cronies barging into Ashcroft's hospital room in the middle of the night, trying to get him to sign things while sedated. But what most people don't know is that this is also a science fiction story.

See, no one's been able to explain who came up with this list of U.S. Attorneys to be fired. Gonzales denies it, his aides deny it, Monica Goodling says it was just sort of circulating around. But if you've read the right books, it's easy to see what happened.

1.
Needing advice on office management, Alberto Gonzales opens a psychic gate to the future, transmitting a distress signal to a society of highly evolved Republican beings in the 24th century.

They prepare their foremost scholar of ancient political science, Monica Goodling, to travel back in time and help organize Alberto's department. She will pose as a graduate of a conservative religious university, with vague legal credentials—a typical cover for time agents.

2.
An outline of U.S. culture and events from 2006-2007 is burned into Monica's mind in a rapid immersion tank: "High School Musical", Shotgun Cheney, Kevin and Britney, some wars, and so on. In this exhaustively studied era, one mystery remains: between seven and nine U.S. Attorneys were fired, for reasons that never became clear. Could Monica be the scholar who will finally uncover the truth?

Practicing her 21st-century handwriting, she copies the list of names and brings it on the journey.

3.
On arriving in the present day, there is much to do: graduating from "Regent University", working on the 2000 election campaign (being careful not to interfere with its inexplicable outcome), joining the Justice Department as a humble Assistant Deputy Statuary Breast Draper, and, finally, organizing Alberto's office.

Now and then, Monica asks casually about the firings of U.S. Attorneys. And gradually she realizes the bizarre truth: no one knows what she's talking about. "What? Why? There's no reason to do that." It never happened.

There's only one explanation: a rogue agent of the future Democrats got there first. History has been changed; Monica's world is no more!

4.
Hoping to find some loophole in the Laws of Temporal Service, Monica tries desperately to make spiritual contact with her own time. The effort leaves her brain drained; as she wanders the halls of Justice in a daze, clutching a handful of notes, her training temporarily deserts her. She drops her notes on Alberto's desk!

The next day, 50 people pass through the Attorney General's office and see a list of names on his desk with the word "fired". And as anyone would, they just assume it's a done deal.

The attorneys lose their jobs—and Monica's reality is saved—but in this new timeline, no one made the decision. They were fired by the universe.

The only thing stupider than European nationalist xenophobia is Americans projecting their own xenophobia over there. I wish people like Mark Steyn fretting about the "demographic decline of the west" were just lone kooks; but I've heard too many otherwise sensible people say things like "Well I'm A Liberal but you have to admit, if the French/English/Dutch start to let all these unassimilated radical Muslims in, how will they preserve their culture and their freedom? It makes you think!"

I wonder how many of them are even aware that France occupied Algeria for 130 years, the Netherlands occupied Indonesia for 300 years, and the English had a bit of an empire thing going on here and there from time to time. This all ended within the lifetime of the current generation's parents and grandparents, and people were going back and forth the whole time. And now people like Steyn think that if non-Christians of North African or Asian descent make up between 4% and 10% of some European countries, and if they're so impudent as to have babies, it's a "fearless Muslim advance" and a cautionary tale for Americans. (And if some nut commits murder in the name of Islam, of course it must mean Those People are uniquely barbaric, because Lord knows the Catholics and the Protestants have always gotten along well over there.) It'd be more sensible if he just said they're after our magic beer.

If you don't want a lot of relatively poor people from another culture to regard your country as a place of opportunity and/or a second home, or if you're offended by their disinclination to assimilate and imitate you, then try not taking over their country. Next thing you know, there'll be Mexicans in Texas and Samoans in San Francisco...